Textpattern 508 Links

One thing I love about W3C validator, for both HTML and CSS, is the keen ability to check incoming referrals, and validate against those pages. This makes creating and maintaining valid code a lot easier than if you had to manually type in every URL or hard-code the links into your pages.

This is something I have long felt was lacking from services such as the automated accessibility checker Cynthia Says. Usually, the best that we can do is have a 508 link which checks the root of our domain. This is all well and good, except that problems tend to creep up on interior pages more often than a home page. It’s easy to neglect the rest of a site.

Luckily, using some of the tag logic provided by Textpattern, we can create self-referential 508 links, so that each and every page on a site can easily be checked for accessibility compliance. Here is an example of the TXP code.

Template logic:

<a href="http://contentquality.com/mynewtester/cynthia.exe?Url1=http://example.com<txp:page_url />">508</a>

HTML output:

<a href="http://contentquality.com/mynewtester/cynthia.exe?Url1=http://example.com/">508</a>

<!-- or -->

<a href="http://contentquality.com/mynewtester/cynthia.exe?Url1=http://example.com/section/article-title">508</a>

Presupposing that your site is set up to follow /section/article-title URL structures, the above code will output a self-checking 508 link for the URL: http://example.com/section/ – except for when on the root of the site, in which case no section name is output.

Likewise, if the user is viewing an individual article, a 508 link to that particular page is provided. With those two angles covered, you’ve pretty much guaranteed that every page on your site will always be check-able, hopefully leading to more accessible code overall. Happy validating!